He entreats parents to put their children on buses so they can be taken away to a secure location.
“Nowhere is safe anymore,” he tells her.īefore long, a reliably inscrutable Liev Schreiber rolls in at the head of a phalanx of tanks. They lob in to a nearby campsite turned tent-city, where Cassie’s father gives her a gun. Soon the family is strapping packs to their back and abandoning their house, which seems to be by-the-course in movies like this, though surely it would be most people’s last move. When the bird flu hits, Cassie’s best friend is quarantined at the local football field, never to be heard from again. A montage of computer-generated tidal waves smashing into Miami and the London Bridge and up office stairwells is terrifying and tossed off, as though Blakeson is in a hurry to get the apocalypse out of the way and on with the story. Cassie and her brother narrowly escape the rushing waters of a burst dam at home in Ohio, while coastal cities suffer the worst of it. All this is condensed by the film into a short flashback as prelude.
Next come floods, then avian flu, then a ground invasion. Soon after, an electromagnetic pulse takes out the world’s power - the first phase.
